Saturday, January 26, 2008

If you are like most people, you work and/or go to school during the week. Maybe you are studying for your CDL test, maybe you are teaching some fourth graders fractions, maybe you helped deliver a baby after you had been on shift for 18 hours, maybe you folded 928,656 sweaters at Old Navy and youre going to fold 928,656 again tomorrow, maybe you retired a few years ago but you still had shit to do around the house. You worked. You did things.

Normal people like you and me work.

But what does a DI Fellow do every day?

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This first look into the every day lives of DI fellows focuses on William Dembski. On paper, WAD is a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary... but according to his schedule he only teaches five hours a week.

He has contributed nothing to the field of mathematics.

So, I mean, what does WAD do all day?

From his actions, I can only guess that he spends his days playing on the internet. We all know he loves to dick around around YouTube, hunting for cool videos to steal, but evidently WAD is also a big fan of Craigslist. Billys alter ego at UncommonDescent, 'Galapagos Finch', just posted the FUNNIEST STORY...

24January2008

Thanks for Your Support ... Evolution of M&M's

Galapagos Finch

Thank you for your support! Dembski’s copyright infringement charges have been dismissed and, after all the shenanigans of you ID crazies, I am back in North Dakota [Details Here].

I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to test the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To accomplish this, I subject M&M’s to repeated trials of survival of the fittest. Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing until one of them cracks. That is the “loser,” and I immediately eat the inferior M&M. The winner survives to the next generation.

In general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world. Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshaped, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions the mutation gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the package. (M&M’s come in packages, birds in flocks, whales in pods and beer in six packs.) Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to: M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc. Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3×5 card reading, “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”

Perhaps Dembski spends his time writing grant applications to continue his work in evolutionary informatics. You know how senior scientists complain that they spend so much time writing applications that they never have time to do any work? Well, think how much worse it is if none of them ever get accepted?

I found the M&M thing going back to ~2003. Apologies for quoting myself...

As a committed materialist, it is painful for me to admit that the scientific method offers no answers as to how such near-identical complex specified information systems could have arisen independently on at least two separate occasions. I could of course use imaginary, psuedo-scientific concepts as "convergent evolution" in order to construct a just-so-story as to how this might have happened.

Dr Dembski's "Explanatory Filter", on the other hand, offers a much more satisfactory conclusion. The parody was quite obviously coded into the DNA of the original writer and... was triggered only to appear in the latter's consciousness at a time and place foretold by the Bible Code. It's that simple.